Facts about Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney from his Mitt Romney 2012 Site:

After going to both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School simultaneously, he passed the Michigan bar, but never worked as an attorney.
As a venture-capitalist, Romney's first major business deal involved investing in a start-up office supply company with one store in Massachusetts that sold office supplies. That company, called Staples, now has over 2,000 stores and employs over 90,000 people.

Romney or his company Bain Capital (using what became known as the "Bain Way") would go on to perform the same kinds of business miracles again and again, with companies like Domino's, Sealy, Brookstone, Weather Channel, Burger King, Warner Music Group, Dollarama, Home Depot Supply, and many others.
Got your calculators handy? Let's recap.

Volunteer campaign worker for his dad's gubernatorial campaign 1 year.
Unpaid intern in Governor's office 8 years.
Mormon missionary in Paris 2 years.
Unpaid bishop and stake president for his church 10 years.

No salary as president of the Olympics 3 years.
No salary as MA governor 4 years.

That's a grand total of 28 years of unpaid service to his country, his community and his church.
Why? Because that's the kind of man Mitt Romney is.And you know what? He'll show you his:
Un-doctored Birth Certificate!
College transcripts!
Law degree!
Isn't it time for a REAL CHANGE?
A brighter HOPE for America.
Forget downing the opposition
Raise up the new president-to-be
The winner in November, 2012!
Mitt Romney - American by birth!

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

From time to time his statement comes back to me when I'm faced with the inexplicable actions, the weak thinking, the unfathomable ignorance, and the cultural cringing of my fellow countrymen in our present era. Yesterday [ July 8, 2007 ] it was the bizarre editorial from the New York Times calling for immediate retreat and surrender in Iraq. Entitled somewhat poetically "The Road Home" the editorial is a monument to "the refusal to imagine" mindset that has overtaken so many Americans after years of the unremitting media water torture on the issue of Iraq. It's key passage reads:

"It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.... Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide."

When I first read this blithe gush issuing -- without heart or care or conscience -- from whatever mind originated it, and passed by whatever chortling editorial process approved it, I felt the twinge of nausea that I often feel when reading the carefully crafted and anonymous twitterings of that paper's editorial pronouncements. But, like most of those moments, I stopped ingesting it and, in time, my nausea passed.

Later that day I was speaking with a friend and the subject of the editorial came up. My friend was mystified by it, hard pressed to understand how a paper like the Times, a paper filled with intelligent people whose families had had no little experience with genocide, could so blithely advocate a policy which would, if carried out, condemn hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqis to death in a thousand brutal ways that we all would "refuse" to imagine. What could possibly be the motivation, the obsession, the vile-on-the-face-of-it commitment to such a policy? Didn't they understand what it would mean?

My answer at the time was that while the editorial board, the publisher, and the Finzi-Contini owners of the New York Times knew full well what it would mean, they didn't care. The settling of political scores and the advancement of their internal political agenda was what mattered. It was indeed the only thing that mattered and their agenda was simple -- they sought "The Restoration" of The Floating World.

The inevitable genocide of the Iraqis would take place off their stage and would not trouble their sleep on beds made plush by three inches of Memory Foam. Of course, their media companies and their minions would report the killings in due course and in the appropriate tone -- taking care not of offend whatever entities were their reporters' hosts for the viewing of the slaughter -- but the slaughter itself would not matter. Their bubble would not be pierced. Their catered dinner parties would go on undisturbed. Their parades would roll through the Village without rain. Their dogs would be walked for them and their dogs' droppings scooped and disposed of for them. Their hands would not touch the droppings.

Their summer homes in the Hamptons would be cleaned and buffed for them. Their waiters at their beach clubs would bring them their beverages on a tray and they would sign for them. Their drivers would always be waiting at the door for them, cars washed, polished and swept. Their power tables at breakfast and lunch would always be set and reserved for them. They would again be welcomed at White House fetes and the bedrooms there would be prepared for them.

It would all be as if George Bush and September 11, and Afghanistan, and Iraq had never happened. There would even be Bill Again -- playing that cool saxophone, smoking those big cigars, and laughing into the long and languid summer nights in the Rose Garden. All would be as it once was. This they could imagine.

Whatever might or might not be happening in Iraq then would be reported as the reports of summer storms in the Midwest tracked as green and red blurs by radar are seen on the Weather Channel -- distant thunder never coming closer. They would "refuse" to imagine it had anything to do with them, that it was anything that could happen to them. After all, the new New York Times Building was several miles from Ground Zero. That was Downtown, they were Midtown.

No. They were safe at last. They were fully assimilated into the safest country on Earth; the Finzi-Continis of our time. They were, once again, fully-vested members of the power elite of the United States of America. They weren't running some dying newspaper on the West Side of Manhattan. They were back. Whatever happened elsewhere was the fault of the previous lost years. History could never happen to them. History, once again, was at an end. History was, once again and this time for good, something that they actually "could not imagine."

They don't care because it isn't happening to them and think it can't happen to them. They are wrong.

Andrew Klavan: The New York Times Answer Man

Despite the Obama-Biden recovery promises that have become sad laugh lines, there seems to be a widespread feeling that the country's economic situation, as one neighbor recently put it so eloquently, "still sucks."

Even Sherlock Obama admitted that recently when he observed, "The past few years have been difficult for this country."

Obama can talk all he wants about light at the end of the tunnel, but three-out-of-four Americans don't share his tunnel vision, saying they know the recession continues. So, happy talk just makes this fundraising-partying-golfing White House crowd look even more out of touch.

Poles on Obama: "ignorance and incompetence."

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House said President Barack Obama misspoke on Tuesday when he referred to a "Polish death camp" while honoring a Polish war hero.

The president's remark had drawn immediate complaints from Poles who said Obama should have called it a "German death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland," to distinguish the perpetrators from the location. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called it a matter of "ignorance and incompetence."

Obama made the comment while awarding the Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. Karski died in 2000.

During an East Room ceremony honoring 13 Medal of Freedom recipients, Obama said that Karski "served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action."

Sikorski tweeted that the White House would apologize for "this outrageous error" and that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk would address the matter on Wednesday.

"It's a pity that such a dignified ceremony was overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence."

Alex Storozynski, president of the Kosciuszko Foundation, said Obama's comment "shocked the Poles present at the White House and those watching on C-SPAN. ... Karski would have cringed if he heard this."

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

I hope that I’m not misunderstanding Ann Althouse when quote
her but when I read this I was immediately struck by the amazing amount of
preening going on.The subject is Dan
Quale’s comment surrounding the unwed parentage of “Murphy Brown.”For those too young to remember the character
was the lead in a situation comedy show named after her who had a child without
being married.Dan Quayle, then Vice
President, tried to make the point hat having children without being married
was not a good idea.He was pilloried by
members of the media for (1) being mean to unmarried mothers who everyone knew
were just as good as married mothers and (2) referring to a fictional character
as a role model.

Ann Althouse is “pushing back” against the belief that
Quayle was right in his comments because … well I – as a long time reader of
her blog – think that in her view, nothing that she’s for is wrong.For example, here is her comment regarding
her position:

Look at what is being admitted. There are a whole lot of
people who are insufficiently smart, competent, and emotionally stable to make
a decision involving a complex set of factors, so we need to dominate their
minds with a starker structure of "right" and "wrong," even where those of us who are really
smart and able to process complex factors know it's not really a matter of
right and wrong.

Putting it in other words: people who are not as smart as Ann
may be having babies out of wedlock so they have to be brainwashed into
thinking that they are doing wrong.The
really smart people know that those stupid moral rules are for simpletons.We can create our own rules because we are “really
smart.”

Not to pick on Ann, but I have noticed the tendency of
people on the Left to be sinless in their own eyes. Ann has a homosexual son so to her the issue
of gay marriage is not open to debate.To her it’s human rights issue that’s clear-cut; her son should not be excluded
from the military or from matrimony.

Ann voted for Obama and that wasn’t a mistake; it’s not her
fault that Obama has turned out to be the kind of President that the Right
predicted.

The Christian view of humans is the belief that we are all
fallen creatures, prone to sin, in need of Christ’s redemption.Ann Althouse prefers to believe that she’s a
very good judge of good and evil and if her view come into conflict with
religious doctrine or millennia of human experience, her view is superior because
she’s one of “.. those of us who are
really smart and able to process complex factors.”

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Mark Steyn views the fruits of the Arab Spring and observes that the jubilation in the West was ... uh ...premature.

Liberated from the grip of Mubarak, the new Egypt is a land where the Israeli embassy gets attacked and ransacked, Christians get killed and their churches burned to the ground, female reporters for the western media are sexually assaulted in broad daylight, and for the rest of the gals a woman's place is in the clitoridectomy clinic.

Remember that the hope was that so-called "social media" was going to transform the Middle East into an upwardly mobile society liberated from the despots of old?

Whatever one feels about the sharia-enforcing, Jew-hating, genital-mutilating enthusiasts of the Muslim Brotherhood, they do accurately reflect a significant slice — and perhaps a majority — of the Egyptian people. The problem with the old-school dictators was that in the end Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi didn't represent anything other than their Swiss bank accounts. The question for the wider world is what do "social media" represent? If they supposedly embody the forces of progress and modernity, then they've just taken an electoral pounding from guys who haven't had a new idea since the 7th century.

Don't get me wrong; I like goofy pet photos. But can these gizmos do anything else? Yes, in theory. But in practice is a culture that "revolves on itself without repose" likely to be that effective at communicating real ideas to the wider world? Ideas on liberty, free speech, property rights, women's rights, and all the other things conspicuous by their absence in the philosophies of Egypt's new political class.

In the end, a revolution cannot be Tweeted. Whatever their defects, the unlovely forces running the new Egypt understand the difference between actually mutilating a young girl's genitals to deny her the possibility of sexual pleasure, and merely "following" your local clitoridectomist on his Twitter feed.

A century ago, the west exported its values. So, in Farouk's Egypt, at the start of a new legislative session, the king was driven to his toy town parliament to deliver the speech from the throne in an explicit if ramshackle simulacrum of Westminster's rituals of constitutional monarchy.

Today, we decline to export values, and complacently assume, as the very term "Facebook Revolution" suggests, that technology marches in support of modernity. It doesn't. Facebook's flat IPO and Egypt's presidential election are in that sense part of the same story, of a developed world whose definitions of innovation and achievement have become too shrunken and undernourished. The vote in Egypt tells us a lot about them, but it also tells us something about us.

Nobody is the most racist guy in America.

Obama has lost roughly 40% of the Democratic primary vote to an imprisoned felon in West Virginia, to “uncommitted” in Kentucky, and to a Tennesee lawyer who “could fit snugly on Dylan Ratigan’s MSNBC show” and who no one in Arkansas likely had heard of before (and who is suing for his delegates).

All of this gave rise to what is one of the great lines of this campaign season, maybe ever, from James Taranto:

Nobody is challenging Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries this year–and is doing surprisingly well.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

How many sons does Obama have?

At the Iowa State Fair Grounds on Thursday, Obama said: “We don’t need another political fight about ending a woman’s right to choose, or getting rid of Planned Parenthood or taking away affordable birth control. We don’t need that. I want women to control their own health choices, just like I want my daughters to have the same economic opportunities as my sons. We’re not turning back the clock. We’re not going back there.”

Mistakenly? Well, he told his publisher that he was born in Kenya. So perhaps he has sons that we have not heard about yet.

The “Preference Cascade” and Obama’s personal popularity.

All the polls I have read about tell me that Obama’s “personal
popularity” is high.In this story from
ABC World News, Obama is “seen favorably by 56 percent of Americans overall,
including 58 percent of women and 53 percent of men.”I have always been puzzled by this, for
several reasons.

First of all, what is “personal popularity?”What question do pollsters ask to get this
number?I went to the Langer Research poll to find out and here is the question:“Do you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of…” and then the two
presidential candidates.We also learn
that George H.W. Bush led Bill Clinton 50 to 37 in popularity in 1992 and we
all know how that turned out.

The thing that puzzles me about these numbers is that they
don’t match up with the popularity of Obama’s policies.Few people have met Obama and fewer know him
personally, so what does the question really mean?Is it a question about looks?About manner?About policy?About race?About who’s side he’s on in the political
divide? About his family, his dog, his
smile, his wealth?We are not voting for
class president or who’s going to be the homecoming queen.And as we saw in the Bush vs. Clinton
popularity poll, the question is far from an infallible guide to the
outcome of the election.John Kerry was
more popular than George W. Bush - 54 to 47 - in 2004 and got creamed in the
election.

Second, there is an unspoken agreement among the American
people, call it “affirmative action in opinion,” that Black people need a
break.It’s the reason that Black
columnists and opinion leaders can make statements that, if the races were reversed,
would be widely seen as racist.So Obama
is assured of getting virtually the entire “favorable” vote from the Black
community and most of the vote of the Liberal community.Having been told since before the 2008
election how popular Barack Obama is it is the brave person indeed who admits
to a pollster that he or she has an unfavorable impression of Obama.We are allowed to object to some of his
policies, we are not allowed to object to his persona.

A very similar phenomenon can be found when people are
polled on the subject of gay marriage.They
know what the “right” answer is and give it to pollsters.It’s only in the privacy of the polling booth
that they are willing to say, via their ballot, what they really believe.

Whether we get a Preference Cascade reflected in
public opinion polling before the election is doubtful.We will be told that most people view Obama
favorably up to and after the election. But the real opinion that people have of
Obama, the poll that counts will be the election and I will lay odds that Obama is not nearly as popular as the
polls would make you believe.

A new book on Barack Obama reveals fresh details about the president’s youthful days as an avid smoker of marijuana — a time when he and his fellow weed smokers called themselves the “Choom Gang.”Among the highlights:
— Obama was known for his interceptions. This is the act of joining a circle of people passing around a joint, taking a hit and yelling, “Intercepted!”
— Obama and his friends at the Punahou School in Hawaii called themselves the “Choom Gang” — choom means smoking weed — and drove around in a Volkswagen bus called the “Choomwagon.”
— Obama and his crew enjoyed what they called “roof hits,” smoking pot inside a car with all the windows rolled up to maximize the amount of smoke they inhaled.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Why Biden is Useful to Obama and the Liberal Media

William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal thinks that Biden is useful to Team Obama because he distracts attention from the President’s gaffes by making bigger ones of his own.

After all, it's not as though Mr. Obama has gone gaffe-less. He's told us America has 57 states, called the Malvinas the Maldives during a visit to South America, and hailed his reforms for bringing "inefficiencies to our health-care system." The president's gaffes, however, are simply not echoed the way the vice president's are.

Perhaps that's because casting Mr. Biden as the fool who is weighing the ticket down helps the president escape accountability for his own agenda. Just how wise, for example, was it for Mr. Obama to ignore the economy in favor of a highly unpopular health-care bill that also cost him a Democratic House? Is it Mr. Biden or Mr. Obama whose policies have kept growth sluggish and unemployment north of 8%? And who was right on the contraceptive mandate?

Say this too for Mr. Biden's latest "gaffes": They have the virtue of being true. The 70,000-plus West Virginians who voted for a Texas prisoner were surely signaling frustration. As for same-sex marriage, it's curious isn't it? Mr. Biden is the dolt even though he spoke straightforwardly about his position, while Mr. Obama is lauded as courageous for feeding us yet another line, which is that he thinks same-sex marriage an issue best left to the states.

The truth is that there are two types of Washington people to be wary of. The first are those who emphasize how smart they are. The second—and they are often the same people—are those quick to label others dumb. ...

In other words, for President Obama to remain all-wise and wonderful with this record, Mr. Biden has to be the stupid one.

How Joe Biden Became a Respected Washington Figure

In case you were wondering how this mobile gaff machine was hailed by the beltway talking heads, this essay by William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal sums it all up:

And why not? The senator from Delaware had earned that respect the old-fashioned way: by embracing virtually every enthusiasm that passed for wisdom inside our Beltway. On foreign policy alone, Mr. Biden helped cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975 after the North invaded. He pushed arms control while opposing the Reagan military buildup. He voted against the Strategic Defense Initiative, voted against the first Gulf War, and so on down the line.

OBAMA ECONOMY CURES TRAFFIC WOES

Traffic congestion dropped 30% last year from 2010 in the USA's 100 largest metropolitan areas, driven largely by higher gas prices and a spotty economic recovery, according to a new study by a Washington-state firm that tracks traffic flows.

So if you have an easier commute to work, thank Obama for high gas prices and a moribund economy.

Inspecting a bed in the motor home, Alvarez noticed a plywood plank with scratched and tool-marked screws and removed the screws and plank. He found two duffel bags, a brown paper bag and a black cooler pouch. Each contained heat-sealed bags of cash, which was later found to total about $815,000. Investigators who processed the money said it smelled strongly of cannabis.

His previous encounter with the law was 42 years ago when he killed someone with a bomb.

Armstrong, 65, was one of three men arrested for their roles in the Aug. 24, 1970, bombing that targeted the Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall on the UW-Madison campus as a protest of Vietnam War. A fourth man wanted in the case, Leo Burt, has never been found. Researcher Robert Fassnacht was killed in the blast. Armstrong was sentenced to 23 years in prison, but his term was later reduced, and he was released in January 1980 after serving seven years.

Tell me again how tough it is to be a Leftist terrorist in this country.
Bill Ayers got away scott free and became a University professor, Angela Davis is a highly paid tenured professor at the University of California. It seems that the path to success in academia is bombs, bullets or, like Elizabeth Warren, false claims of minority status.

Big Bain Backfire

Monday, May 21, 2012

The attack by the violent Left. Part 2

It turns out that the violent Leftist supported by the Tides
Foundation, Barbra Streisand and John
Kerry’s wife has forced a blogger to take his family and flee his home.How long is this MSM terror going to continue?

Is the Washington Post actually helping Romney?

My first reaction was: it’s another classic Washington Post hit piece on the Republican candidate. This is sheer religious bigotry disguised as a news story. We are supposed to think less of Mitt Romney for what a gang of Mormons did 150 years ago? Romney’s a Mormon, the inference goes so he’s part of a murderous killer cult.

That was after the same paper had a book-length front page article about him being a “bully” for cutting a classmate’s hair … 40 years ago.

And remember the awful thing that George Allen did? He called some opposition researcher who was following him around videotaping his appearances “macaca.” No one on this continent recognizes that term as a racial slur and to this day I’m not convinced it is, but it convinced enough people that Allen spent the rest of the campaign trying to prove he wasn’t a racist based on a word no one had ever heard before. It was an incredible story made up out of whole cloth. It worked for the race-baiters at the Washington Post because it helped them defeat Allen.

But there is another way to look at this. Forget about the Post’s motives, consider the impact. It may actually generate sympathy for Romney.

Have you ever been in a situation in which you wish the people on your side were not on your side? They were so foolish, bigoted, stupid, choose-your-own-adjective that you really didn’t want to be associated with them? I’m glad that the Washington Post is not on our side because I would be embarrassed. The Washington Post with its hit pieces is a problem for the Democrats. Not content with making a federal case out of where dogs should rid on car trips, it goes back 40 years to find fault with Romney as a high school student and 150 years to smear his religion. That’s not just weak, it’s fodder for ridicule. If I were Mitt Romney, I would buy copies of the article and pass them out at rallies.

And if you think I’m wrong, click on the link, go to the article and begin reading the comments (there are over 400); virtually all negative.

The attack by the violent Left.

There are a few high profile instances that get some reporting. Note that in this report from the NY Times who these rioters are and what their motivation is covered in 11 words: "opposed to war and to NATO or motivated by other issues." Not to beat a dead horse too much, you can give generous odds that of the impossible happened and the group rioting were Tea Partiers, they would be identified and they would be pilloried for being racist, sexist homophobes and a threat to the country.

Some you only heard about if you get your important
information from the Internet.For
example it seems that a convicted terrorist named Brett Kimberlin, with funding
from the Tides Foundation, Barbra Streisand and John Kerry’s wife has been
stalking a blogger named Aaron Worthing, got him and his wife fired because of
threats of violence and tried to frame him for a crime.

The Internet is becoming a more dangerous place as people go beyond invective and insults and try to do others real harm.

Here's more from Stacy McCain. ... It takes an “Army of Breitbarts” to overcome the indifference, inertia and bias of the mainstream media. One blogger can accomplish little on his own, and I am therefore grateful to all those who have helped call attention to the Kimberlin case, including:

Someone has been misled.

The subhead, found in the dead tree version of the column
read “Try as Republican Legislators might, it’s hard to convince Virginians
that their votes against a judicial candidate weren’t base on his sexual
orientation.”

Perhaps Shawn Day didn’t write the subhead, but whoever did should
be ashamed.

First, the they confuse themselves with Virginians in general. The people who write for the Virginian Pilot represent Virginians the same way as Grant's army represented the Confederacy. Virginians are not particularly interested in who gets appointed to
judgeships. It's not a hot topic around the dinner table, unlike - for example - jobs and the economy. Those who understand the system and who care understand that judgeships
are mostly awarded as political favors to supporters.

Second, Virginia – especially Tidewater Virginia, home of
the largest Navy base in the world – is home to a population that understands
better than most people that deliberately disobeying a lawful command is a grave
offence.Tracy Thorne-Begland enlisted
in the Navy knowing he was homosexual and lied about. He then came out as homosexual in such a way
that the Navy could not pretend it did not know in direct contradiction of
lawful orders.People in this Navy town
hear and read about officers relieved of duty or cashiered for lesser offenses
on a regular basis.

What can we conclude from Thorne-Begland’s actions?We know that if he feels strongly enough
about an issue, rules, regulations and laws are not going to restrain him.It appears that Shawn Day is fine with that
because he makes a few points supporting Thorne-Begland:

He committed his offense 20 years ago.

A General District Court judge is mostly
concerned with traffic and misdemeanor cases.

To which my response is that oath and law breaking should disqualify a person from being a judge. There is no shortage of good
people, people who have not broken their oath, who would love to be appointed
to the bench. The pay is good, there is no heavy lifting and unless you do something really bad you have a lifetime job. We don't have to appoint liars because we have run out of honest citizens.

But this article was really not about Throrne-Begland.It was an exercise in Republican
bashing.It was an excuse for a badly
educated bully with access to the press to cast Republicans – as a group – as homophobes.I know some of the people who voted against the
appointment and know two things about them: (1) there is not a bigoted bone in
their bodies and (2) they were courageous in their vote because they knew that
they would be attacked as bigots by the Liberal media.The selective
quotes from supporters of the nominee, the weak reasons given for his
appointment really don’t have to hang together as a rational argument.The answer to anyone who disagrees with the
Liberal agenda a “shut up” followed by name calling.

Ironically, in the same edition of the Virginian Pilot the editors decide to print two letters attacking Mitt Romney for cutting a classmate's hair 40 years ago and one attacking his religion. It's the Virginian Pilot way.

Which brings me to a recent post by Janice Fiamengo, a
professor of English at the University of Ottawa.Her essay entitled The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn neatly encapsulates the kind of people, like Shawn
day, who write for the Virginian Pilot.

“The honeymoon is over.” Instructors who award low grades in
humanities disciplines will likely be familiar with a phenomenon that occurs
after the first essays are returned to students: former smiles vanish, hands
once jubilantly raised to answer questions are now resentfully folded across
chests, offended pride and sulkiness replace the careless cheer of former days.
Too often, the smiles are gone for good because the customary “B+” or “A”
grades have been withheld, and many students cannot forgive the insult.

.... Every
instructor who has been so besieged knows the legion of excuses and expressions
of indignation offered, the certainty that such work was always judged
acceptable in the past, the implication that a few small slip-ups, a wrong word
or two, have been blown out of proportion. When one points out grievous
inadequacies — factual errors, self-contradiction, illogical argument, and
howlers of nonsensical phrasing — the student shrugs it off: yes, yes, a few
mistakes, the consequences of too much coffee, my roommate’s poor typing,
another assignment due the same day; but you could still see what I meant,
couldn’t you, and the general idea was good, wasn’t it? “I’m better at the big
ideas,” students have sometimes boasted to me. “On the details, well … ”.

Meetings about bad grades are uncomfortable not merely
because it is unpleasant to wound feelings unaccustomed to the sting. Too
often, such meetings are exercises in futility. I have spent hours explaining
an essay’s grammatical, stylistic, and logical weaknesses in the wearying
certainty that the student was unable, both intellectually and emotionally, to
comprehend what I was saying or to act on my advice. It is rare for such
students to be genuinely desirous and capable of learning how to improve. Most
of them simply hope that I will come around.

The unteachable student has been told all her life that she
is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at
whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability. … ...In the past twenty
years, the well-documented phenomenon of grade inflation in humanities subjects
— the awarding of high “Bs” and “As” to the vast majority of students — has
increased the conviction that everyone is first-rate.

…

Of course, the progressive approach has advantages, not the
least of which is that it enables university administrators to boast of the
ever-greater numbers of students taking degrees at their institutions.
... Thus our
universities participate in a happy make-believe. Students get their degrees.
Parents are reassured that their money has been well-spent. And compliant
professors are, if not exactly satisfied — it corrodes the soul to give
unearned grades — at least relieved not to encounter student complaints.

More than a few students know that something fishy is going
on. The intelligent ones see their indifferent, mediocre, or inept counterparts
receiving grades similar to their own, and the realization offends their sense
of justice. ...

In contrast, the weak student who believes in his high
grades has also had a disservice done him. He has been misled about his
abilities, falsely persuaded that career paths and goals are open that may be out
of reach. …

Even more seriously, such students have not only been misled
but fundamentally malformed. They have never learned to listen to criticism, to
recover from disappointment, or to slog through difficulties with no guarantee
of success except commitment. The person who is never challenged is also never
refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high
endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be
hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to
confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly
important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance,
anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to
show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of
them.

Not everyone of them is unemployed and camping out at an OWS hate-fest. A few get jobs writing editorials for the Virginian Pilot.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

DRUDGE: "FAKEBOOK: IPO GIVES NO RETURN "

It was the biggest IPO in US history and everyone was
clamoring to get in on it.And it could
well be the biggest scam since Fannie & Freddie cooked the books.

The insiders sold the public about $16 billion worth of
stock, making a bunch of new paper billionaires.But the hype was more gut than analysis.There are millions of people with Facebook
accounts and they all wanted some of the stock.

Is there a case to be made for the longevity of Facebook, or
are people going to go to the next thing after they get tired of posting
pictures and messages for their friends and find that most of those messages
are really not very interesting?What
are the barriers to entry for competition?What about other sites like LinkedIn?What about GM’s announcement that it was dropping Facebook advertising because
it wasn’t effective?What about the syndicate that underwrote
Facebook having to come into the market and buy stock to keep the price above
the $38 offering price?

It’s dangerous and financially risky to invest in fads,
unless you can find a greater fool to take the stock off your hands at a higher
price than you paid before it crashes.28
year-old Mark Zuckerberg found a bunch of suckers to make him one of the
richest men on the planet.My money is
on the prediction that he will be unloading more of his stock as soon as he’s
legally allowed.

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human
population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon
modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own
words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and
there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will
try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect
life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to
the sides.

He's suggesting that humanity could be reduced via nuclear or biological weapons. I'm fairly sure he will get a respectful hearing at a meeting of Greenpeace or most other environmental organizations. These are the fundamental ideas driving environmental policy nowadays. It’s Himmler in a green shirt. These are not nice people who want good things for everyone. These are evil people who hanker after mass death. Jusr as many on the Left declared that 9/11 were "America's chickens coming home to roost," the sudden death of most people on earth would have its cheering section.

Food Stamps and the $41 Cake

There is a large chain grocery store in my neighborhood that I rarely frequent because the prices are too high. Instead, I will travel an extra 30 blocks to another store where the costs per item are 20%-30% lower.

I arrange my travel around this activity. It takes a little extra effort, but within a year the savings are substantial. As it turns out, I am not alone. The average income of Costco discount shoppers, it was reported recently, is $96,000—so perhaps they're not the millionaires and billionaires the president talks about, yet not the folks one might immediately expect to be watching their pennies either.

But every so often I will need one item late at night—a quart of milk, a missing part of a school lunch—and I run over to the high-price store nearby. There, I've noticed something happening with increased regularity: The person ahead of me in line or at the next checkout counter is using a benefits card. Since we are now in the third year of our national recession and unemployment remains depressingly high, I understand this.

Recently I had to run into that store and, sizing up the three lines, chose to stand behind a woman with one item in her cart. It was one of those large ice-cream cakes. When the checkout person said "Forty-one dollars," I wasn't the only one who blanched. The shopper's son, around 12, repeated it as a question: "Forty-one dollars?"

I quickly calculated that the woman's cake was eight times more expensive than the kind I make at home to celebrate birthdays. The mother ignored her son's question.

She took out her benefits card, swiped it through the machine, and they were off. My turn.

I stood there, wondering what lesson the young boy takes away from this transaction. Does he grow up with the faintest understanding of delayed gratification—that you have to earn your money before you can buy candy—or, in this case, an ice-cream treat? I wondered how we arrived at this point as a nation. I also felt like a chump.

The vast majority of Americans—Democrat, Republican or independent—will readily help someone who cannot make ends meet in a bad economy. Americans want a hungry child to be fed. I know this because in no other country do people donate more to charities. Americans will go far beyond what our taxes already pay for to help the less fortunate. We have been blessed with overabundance in this land, and we are a very generous people.

But over the last four decades, our government has quietly done away with almost all of the restrictions once placed on food assistance. SNAP cards (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) can be used to purchase practically anything with the exception of liquor and cigarettes. These cards are also openly and illegally sold for cash, which allows the recipient to buy anything they want, including cigarettes and liquor.

Food assistance is helping many families keep their heads above water when they would otherwise not get by, and many of these families watch every dime. But the system also allows people to flagrantly disregard the program's original purpose.

Of course there are instances of fraud in every corner of the government, from Congress to defense spending. Why single out food stamps? Because, with over 48 million Americans now using some form of food assistance and few restrictions, the possibilities of waste are unlimited.

...

When we wonder how this great nation traveled from our grandparents' common sense to where we are today, it might be easier to understand with this question: How did the country that created the strongest middle class in history, the country that offered everyone the chance to succeed, the country that built and paid for the transcontinental railroad and the Hoover Dam, won World War II and put Neil Armstrong on the moon—how did that country rack up trillions in debt?

The military is a very, very big proponent of Diversity Training. Here’s a comment from a member of the military.

Had to attend “Diversity” Training every three years during my 22 year military career. EVERY SINGLE YEAR I saw the trainers turn co-workers and friends against each other. Common courtesy and general friendliness was actively suspended so we could “Dig a little deeper” and ignite/inflame deeply buried prejudices. Destroyed the work environment & friendships for months/years afterwards EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Miriam Goderich, whose literary agency described eventual-President Obama in 1991 as having been born in Kenya, said today that the description reflected "a simple mistake and nothing more."

"You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya," Goderich said in a statement to Roll Call. "This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me -- an agency assistant at the time." Roll Call's Taegan Goddard added, for disclosure, that he is "a client of the same literary agency."

Which leads to the question: why did she think he was born in Kenya? And why did Obama not correct it at the time?

Why do stories about Obama's past change or, other then his two biographies (which are now shown to be partly fictional), is there so much that's unknown about him? Why do we have a President, for God's sake, who even now, nearly four years after his election, is still so much a mystery?

We have a man who makes very specific promises about creating five million new jobs in the Green Energy industry and two millionjobs rebuilding roads, bridges (see video of construction work going to China) and schools and who comes nowhere near fulfilling those promises and blames veryone but himself.

Roger Simon also wonders where the literary agent got the idea that Obama was born in Kenya.

But why did Obama’s agents think he was born in Kenya? That’s a more interesting question. (Obama, of course, is a liar either way.)I will leave aside for the moment the question of whether he vetted the agent’s material himself. As the author of eleven published books and seven produced feature films, I have had plenty of dealings with agents and publicity people and always looked over the bios they had written about me. Every author I ever talked to about it always did too. We’re those kind of egotists. But I have no way of proving that Obama did — although I would faint if he hadn’t.

But whatever he did, the question remains. Why did they put “Born in Kenya” in his bio and leave it there until 2007? The latter part of that question can of course be ascribed to normal human sloth, but the first part — there’s the rub.

Here are the explanations I can think of:1. Obama told them. 2. It was in some early draft of Obama’s abandoned book (Journeys in Black and White) he submitted to them. 3. Obama wrote it in his book proposal to them. 4. Obama told them in a query letter. 5. Obama answered one of those biographical forms. 6. … Well, I’m running out because they all amount to the same thing.

There is one other possibility. The agents simply made up the place of Obama’s birth, but I have never in all my life heard of a literary agent doing such a thing. It’s possible I suppose, but hardly likely. And why?

Anyway, per Occam’s Razor, I am going with the obvious — the agent’s source for Obama’s birthplace was… Barack Obama.But again why? Why would he lie about where he was born?

…..My wife Sheryl and I, like Nick and Nora Charles, discussed it over gimlets this evening. We both agreed the mystery lay somewhere in Obama’s college and university years at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. We knew, as you do, there must be an explanation for why the court eunuchs of the mainstream media have never bothered even to investigate the scholastic career of the most powerful person in the world.

Because Obama got bad grades? Yawn — so did Bush, Kerry, Biden, Ted Kennedy, and dozens of others who later found themselves making life or death decisions over our lives.

No, it had to be something more significant, more potentially dangerous. What if, we thought, as others have suggested, the reason Obama’s school records have not surfaced is that he enrolled, at one of those institutions at least, as a foreign student — a Kenyan?

But why would he choose to do that? Well, maybe for a grant, a subvention, a scholarship that was available uniquely to students from Africa or similar locales.

Yes, I know that’s not “fair,” in the lexicon of the Lord of Fairness, to have adopted a phony identity and deprived others of an opportunity they may have more richly deserved. But it would certainly fit with Obama’s early need to be recognized as a Kenyan by his agent and, presumably, his publisher. As we all know, it’s not the crime, but the cover-up. (In this case, actually, it’s both.)

As time went on, of course, college drifted away and politics reared its head. The Kenyan identity became less necessary, even a liability, so it was dropped.

I don’t know about you — but this makes sense to me. It also fits with the tomb-like silence around his college years.

Chuck Schumer’s proposal to put a fence around the US to hold Americans captive

This is the sort of thing that Communist countries do, try to keep their people from fleeing repression. What next? Barbed wire, guard towers, moats with mines and guard dogs? A cult of messianic personality in the White House, a legislature inhabited by evil, lying cretins like Schumer and now a proposal to stop people from escaping.

It’s interesting that, rather than change their ways of doing business and
introducing legislation that provides incentives for productive people to come
here and stay here, they maintain policies that chase people away, and introduce
new ones to lock the door after they’re gone.

The lesson here (especially for natural-born citizens) is this: simply by
accident of birth, you are born with a lifelong obligation that you never signed
up for to finance the corrupt misdealings of the political class. And if you
choose to abandon this obligation, they will bar you from ever entering your
homeland again.

Regardless of what the propaganda says, this is not how a free society treats
people. It might look and feel like a representative democracy on the surface,
but under the hood it’s the modern day equivalent of feudal serfdom.

Remember the Trayvon Martin brouhaha? The MSM almost universally concluded that George Zimmerman both stalked and then murdered Martin in cold blood. Many commentators ignored any evidence to the contrary. The geniuses at Slate.com even had a reporter go to the Florida community where Martin was shot and interview some women who claimed to see Zimmerman shoot him in cold blood. They said that Martin was never on top of him and had not been banging Zimmerman’s head on the ground at all.

Now, the Florida district attorney has released 67 CDs of evidence, and made them available to the press. ABC News has for once done the MSM proud, by headlining their story with a bold conclusion: “Cops, Witnesses Back Up George Zimmerman’s Version of Trayvon Martin Shooting.” ...

Of course the initial reaction came from the race baiters in the black community and their megaphone in the racist Liberal (but I repeat myself) MSM.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Literary Bio Claims Obama Born in Kenya

Truth rule for politicians - a radical reform proposal.

I realize that I’m going to make a radical proposal.But all commonly accepted wisdom was once
radical departure from common thought.

I’m a financial advisor.If I get caught promising a certain return, I get put out of
business.If I get caught promising any
of my clients that if they follow my advice they will get a certain outcome I
will be prosecuted.I can’t use client
testimonials in advertising.If I misrepresent
my competitors I get prosecuted.The
fact is, if I lie, exaggerate or misrepresent the past, the present or the
future I am liable.

Why are politicians not held to my standard?Are they less powerful?Are they less consequential?Do they have less of an impact on the people of
this country that I do?

No.

Do they get to make the rules?Yes!Who’re the people who get to call you even when you are on the “do not
call list?”Politicians!

Who gets to promise to create 10 million new good paying
jobs without fear that they will be prosecuted for lying? Politicians!

Who get to lie about their opponents with no fear of the
hand of the law?Politicians!

I propose a new objective for the Tea Party.Let’s
get a law passed that makes it a crime for a politician to promise something
that he does not deliver.

Let’s get a law passed that makes it a crime for a
politician to make a claim about his opponent that is untrue.

For those who claim that would inhibit free speech, I ask
why do these very same rules apply to people in my industry and it’s not found
unconstitutional?Are political figures
somehow above the laws they pass for other people?From Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Upon what
meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?

Politician, especially politicians – because they control an
incredibly large part of our lives – should be held to standards of
truthfulness that exceeds those of other professions.I realize that’s a radical thought, but it
could be the single biggest contribution that an merging political movement could
get behind.

And who is going to support
political liars? We still outnumber politicians.